I passed beautiful teenage girls who were overly well-dressed and clearly out walking and looking for boys. I was passed by teenage boys covered in mud on 4-wheelers with beautiful teenaged girls riding on the back, also covered in mud, all smiling big happy smiles. I passed a house with a shit-brown Chevy van that looks a lot like a shit-brown Chevy van I had a run-in with in Birmingham several weeks ago and which has since been spotted broken down here and there around My Little Redneck Town. I passed young, beautiful moms out in their yards watching their children play while they weeded their gardens. I passed a lot of kids playing basketball at various different houses. I passed the house where a couple of bikers and their families lived which now has a "For Sale" sign in front of it. I just slowly took it all in as I walked to nowhere in particular.
It was cold out, but as long as I walked in the sun I was OK. Parts of each street were directly in the sunlight and I tried to walk slowly in those parts. Parts of them were in the cold, cold shade and I walked fast in those parts.
I took note of who had lost shingles in various storms that have come through and still not replaced them. I saw houses in need of paint and wondered about the consequences of removing lead from paint now that everyone seems to repaint their wooden houses almost every other year. I felt proud of myself for sticking to my guns and buying an all-brick house.
I thought about the fact that not one of the neighbor kids playing basketball had the goal set at the correct height and I thought about how that wasn't even an option when I was a kid. We played with the rim at 10 feet no matter how small or how tall we were. I think I'm glad we did.
I counted El Caminos, thinking about how appropriate it is that Earl drives one on "My Name Is Earl." There are 4 within 4 blocks of my home. I remembered the episode where he had to drag-race to win back the old Mustang his dad had bought intending to give him when he was a kid. I laughed again remembering how the engines in both cars broke down, forcing both drivers to yell for their weak-minded associates to give them a push to the finish line and Earl won because the other guy's friend was a smoker.
At one point I approached a house where a man in his early 30s was out pulling weeds. His daughter was in the yard with him playing with a neighbor girl. Their dog was out with them. The dog saw me first and came running to greet me as I passed. I stopped and petted the friendly dog, scratching his ears and his neck and then his chest, which generally leads to my having a friend for life once I've done it.
Apparently scratching a dog's chest is the canine equivalent of a blow-job.
Another dog came running from across the street, wanting to have his chest scratched, too. The man's daughter came over and tried to pull the dogs back into the yard. Her friend had run across the street to ask her dad something. About this time she peeked out her front door from across the street and yelled to the man weeding his front yard, "he says for YOU to come HERE."
"I can't. I'm busy. Mike's not doing anything, is he? What's he doing?" the man asked the girl.
"He's playing a game on the computer and he doesn't want to get up," she responded. Their voices echoed between the houses, giving a feeling of life and activity to the neighborhood that had been so dead and quiet during the long winter.
It was then that I noticed the big, black pig, as large as a Pit Bull casually standing in the front yard not 15 feet from me.
I had to look twice to make sure it wasn't one of those statues that strange people like to put in their front yards for reasons only their doctor can comprehend. You see, we have a distant neighbor with a concrete pig on the top of a brick post at the base of their front stairs leading up to their door. They like to put a little University of Arkansas t-shirt and hat on the pig during football season. But other than the clothes there is nothing about their concrete pig that looks even remotely lifelike.
One more long, hard look to be certain and then I had to speak.
"That sure is a funny looking dog you got there," I observed proudly.
The man weeding his yard looked up at me and smiled. "That ain't no dog. That's a pig."
He proceeded to tell me about how he and his pig had recently been featured in the local paper. As he spoke I remembered seeing the article, but there was no mention of his address so I had no idea that the giant pig was living in my own neighborhood.
"We were pretty surprised when we first moved in because we found out the people who used to live in that house," he said as he pointed two houses down from his, "also had a pig like ours."
What?! Two giant black pigs were living in my neighborhood at the same time and I never knew?! WTF?!!
"Are you serious?!" I asked him, as if anyone other than a total redneck and My Dad would think to lie about something like that.
"Yeah, we always got strange looks for having a pig, but this was the first time we'd ever had a neighbor with one, too."
The pig was staring at me in a vaguely interested sort of way. The dogs, meanwhile, were reluctantly moving back into their yard as ordered, only to step back down into the street again so I could scratch them some more.
I replied, "well, I know two of the people on this street have large rabbits. One of them thinks he's a dog. He grew up playing with their dogs and I've seen him in their backyard running and playing with the dogs. They say he has no idea he's a rabbit." I stood shivering in the shade that had crept up on me.
"Yeah? I didn't know that," he said. Then he pointed to his pig, "he thinks he's a dog, too. He's only ever had my dogs to play with. He has no idea that he's not a dog."
We talked a little longer about pigs and rabbits who think they're dogs. Then I said "I'll let you get back to it" and I resumed my walk, now more aware of the exact nature of my neighborhood than I had been before.
We've had neighbors with chickens. We've had neighbors who would run in front of speeding cars without looking while in pursuit of their dogs, who were in pursuit of a squirrel. We've had neighbors who lay in their driveways in bikinis to get a tan (still do, thank God.) We've had neighbors who painted their house a screaming blue with purple highlights. We have a lot of neighbors who dragrace and keep elaborate race cars in their garages that are easily worth as much as their entire house. We've had neighbors who didn't have a garage and so they parked their Harleys on their front sidewalk, blocking their own front door. We have a neighbor who pulled the door off their mailbox only to let it drop to the street and then just left it laying there for 3 weeks now. We have neighbors with a hula hoop on the roof above their front door that has been up there for several months. We have neighbors with tired old El Caminos.
And now, it turns out, we have neighbors with large black pigs who think they're dogs living in their backyards.
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